


i hate the beach

by acrosstheroom



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Small Town, M/M, Strangers to Lovers, Thunderstorms, felix loves ghosts, they live in my hometown and it's the 2000s ok
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:34:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28019343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acrosstheroom/pseuds/acrosstheroom
Summary: Hyunjin and Felix have lived on the same island for as long as they've known each other (a pretty long time). Every year, around summertime, the tourists swarm to its beaches and tend to do nothing more than annoy the locals. This year, though, one particular tourist catches Hyunjin's and Felix's eye. They don't think about him too much, knowing he'll leave the island before sundown, but they end up spending a little more time together than expected.
Relationships: Hwang Hyunjin/Lee Minho | Lee Know
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	1. Chapter 1

Hyunjin’s been living here, same little town, almost his whole life. Same foggy air and same creaky house, long as he can remember. He went to the same school with the same class and the same best friend, he looked at the same freckles every day. Every summer, there’s a surge of tourists that come from mainland and they’re always the same; annoying rich folk who coo over the perceived simplicity of the island. Usually, Hyunjin will ignore it. He’ll walk to the baseball park with his best friend, Felix, and they’ll play around in the uncomfortably marshy field where no tourist would dare go. 

This year, though, the tourists came earlier than usual, Hyunjin and Felix saw them drive by their school as they walked to the nearby snack shop. 

Sitting at his favorite table, drinking a sticky Sundrop soda, Hyunjin tries to ignore them as much as possible. It’s kinda hard, though, ‘cause Felix is ignoring _him_ , which is pretty stupid. 

“Dude,” he whines, “Why are you doing homework? It’s Friday.” 

Felix shrugs, looking up from his book. 

“I wanna enjoy the weekend, man, I don’t wanna worry about having work due.” 

Hyunjin rolls his eyes. 

“Yeah, but I wanna enjoy it _too_ and you’re _ignoring_ me, and you know how much it annoys me when the _others_ —” he says it dramatically, like it’s a bad word, “— come to town.” 

Felix laughs at Hyunjin, the drama queen, but he’s not looking at his face, he’s looking just slightly past it. 

“What are you looking at?” Hyunjin asks, whipping his head around instinctively. Felix whisper-shouts at him, but he doesn’t turn back around — he sees what Felix was looking at. 

It’s a guy who looks about their age, probably a little older, sitting by himself with a book and a cherry Coke. He’s at his own little table on the shop’s front porch, on the opposite end from Hyunjin and Felix. Honestly, he’s pretty cute. 

Hyunjin whips his head back around to look at Felix. 

“That guy?” He asks, jerking his head backward in the dude’s direction. Felix nods. 

“Is he a tourist, do you think?” Felix asks, “He looks our age, but he’s alone, wouldn’t he be with family?” 

Hyunjin shrugs, sneaking glances back at him every time he thinks he can. 

“Why were you staring at him, huh?” He teases, kicking Felix’s leg under the table. 

“Because,” Felix says, smiling, “he was staring at _you_ and it was getting kinda weird. Maybe you’ve got a little stalker, man.” 

“What do you mean, ‘staring at me?’” Hyunjin asks. 

“Like, he just kept looking over here,” Felix says, “Wait, he just looked again — dude, he _ikes_ you!” 

Hyunjin rolls his eyes. “ _Dude_ , I doubt that. Remember in fifth grade when you thought that girl with the braids _'l_ _iked’_ me ‘cause she was staring at me, and it turned out she was having a seizure?” 

Felix shakes his head, “He’s not having a seizure, I know the difference now. _And_ _,_ you don’t know for _s_ _ure_ that that girl wasn’t into you, to be fair.” 

* * *

Because of the unexpected tourist-horde, Felix and Hyunjin eventually escape the shop, leaving the stranger behind with his book and cherry Coke. They walk to Felix’s house to sit in the cemetery that lies next to it so that Felix can continue his little passion-project of trying to decipher all the names carved into the old, weathered headstones. Nobody on the island uses this cemetery anymore, since a new one was built in an area that’s _not_ directly next to somebody’s house, so the relatives of the corpses in the ground were likely gone and forgotten by now. 

After many floods and hurricanes, half of the stones are smooth and unremarkable, with nothing left to suggest who or what might be buried underneath. Felix has his notebook of all the names he’s been able to make out and what might be true about that person’s life, though Hyunjin doubts it’s very accurate. It’s definitely interesting, though, especially with the little illustrations of what they might’ve looked like that decorate the margins. 

With Felix working on one of the older headstones, Hyunjin lies back on the grass and watches the sky above them. There’re dark storm clouds in the distance, but they look too far away to be of any threat. Then he hears something that draws his attention away from the weather. 

He’s here, again. The guy they saw at the shop after school, he’s here, now, walking down the residential street next to Felix’s house, just past the decrepit bookstore that was destroyed in the last hurricane that hit. He’s definitely a tourist, they’ve concluded, he’s taking pictures of everything like he’s never been outside before. 

“Dude, what’s up with this guy?” Felix whispers to Hyunjin, jerking his head in the man’s direction. “Is he a ghost or some shit? It’s starting to freak me out, to be honest.” 

Hyunjin dramatically rolls his eyes at Felix, lightly pushing him on the shoulder. “Ghosts aren’t real, man. He’s just a tourist, they’re always like this. Haven’t you lived here longer than me? You should know.” 

It’s true, Felix knows the island better than anybody, knows all the coolest trees and most haunted gravestones at the British Cemetery, rocks on top of dirt on top of bodies of washed-up, unidentified soldiers from wars in years past. He’s even got a local’s accent, one that Hyunjin hadn’t even heard from someone younger than 50 years old before. 

Hyunjin’s from the mainland, a “dingbatter” as the locals would say, but he’s been on the island since kindergarten; he can remember, because the island’s name had been one of the first words he learned to write. Still an outsider, though, in the eyes of native islanders. 

“Yeah, I have, so _I_ of all people should know about the ghosts of this place,” Felix says, smug. "We’re literally sitting, like, six feet above dead people. Don’t act like _I’m_ the crazy one for believing in spirits.” 

As they bicker, between the trees, walking through the mud and wet leaves with pristine white tennis-shoes is the stranger. Being hidden, Hyunjin and Felix can get a better look at him. He’s alone, again. He wanders around aimlessly, but he doesn’t look lost. 

“I’m telling you, he’s a ghost,” Felix tells Hyunjin, “He’s moving so confidently, he knows this place, but he’s never been here. Dude, it’s the spirit of an old resident.” 

The man turns around. Felix pales, like a ghost himself. The man’s definitely looking at them, and Felix hides behind Hyunjin in his panic. Hyunjin tries to hide himself but with Felix gripping him so tightly, all he can do is tumble behind a gravestone and try to disappear. His height betrays him. 

Slowly, the man comes closer, carefully avoiding pockets on mud on the marshy ground. 

“Hello?” he says, a slight smirk on his face. “Is somebody there?” 

Meekly, Felix pops a hand out from behind Hyunjin, his human shield, and waves. 

The man laughs and waves back. 

“Are you a ghost?” asks a still-hidden Felix. 

“No,” is the simple, if bewildered response. 

“Are you on vacation?” Hyunjin says. “You don’t look like the usual tourists.” 

“Yeah. My family is visiting for the day,” the man says. “You guys live here?” 

Hyunjin nods. 

“Where’s your family, then?” Felix asks, finally appearing from behind Hyunjin. 

“They’re out shopping,” he answers, “I’ve just been wandering around, I didn’t wanna go in all those crowded shops with them.” 

“Wanna hang out with us?” Felix says after a beat of silence. Hyunjin glares at him. 

“Hang out with two random kids I met in a graveyard?” the stranger says with a laugh. “Y’know, actually, fuck it, yeah. I’m staying with my family for vacation and I really needed an excuse to get away from them... I’m Minho, by the way.” 

“We aren’t _random kids you met in a graveyard,”_ Felix notes. “We saw you at that store earlier. You got a Coke and you kept ogling my friend.” Hyunjin is already embarrassed and used to it, being friends with Felix, but this is really pushing it 

“I was looking at your friend’s _sweater_ ,” Minho explains. “It was really hot this morning and I didn’t know why he’d have brought one, but I’m kinda jealous now.” Typical for the island’s weather, the day had started out with heat from the sun but soon resorted to a chilly, wet day with the winds moving over the ocean. Of course Minho wouldn’t know, the fuckin’ tourist. 

“Oh,” Hyunjin says. _Oh._ Felix’s tendency to insist anybody who looks at him has a _crush_ on Hyunjin gets annoying, really, but this time he’d kind of been hoping, in the back of his mind, that he was right. Minho’s cute, just a little. 

“I’m Felix, this is Hyunjin,” Felix says after realizing “oh” would be the end of Hyunjin’s introduction. “Hey, we can be your tour guides! I’ll show you where all the ghosts are, but we gotta wait ‘til it’s dark.” 

Minho chuckles. Hyunjin rolls his eyes. 

“Dude, are you eight?” he hisses, half out of exhaustion from the constant ghost-hunting missions Felix tries to drag him into and half to look cool in front of Minho. _Felix_ may still be an immature kid at 17, but Hyunjin’s mature; precocious. Most importantly, a few months older than Felix. 

“Just because _you’re_ a pussy doesn’t mean _Minho_ is too,” Felix says, trying to sneer, but his smile gives him away. 

“As much as I’d love to meet the ghosts, I’m catching the eight o’clock ferry back tonight,” Minho says, “I have to meet back up with my family a while before then, since it’s such a long drive to the slip.” 

Felix pouts. “Why even come here if you aren’t going to stay the night? It’s the best part.” 

Hyunjin disagrees, preferring the sunny weekend mornings where he and Felix can bike to the ice-cream shop before the first ferry arrives with mainlanders. There’s nothing fun at night, too few kids to have wild parties and too few businesses open past midnight. Christ, they don’t even have a _McDonald’s._

Minho shrugs at Felix. “I didn’t choose it; my mom plans the vacation trips. If she wants to visit a tourist trap at four PM then that’s what we’ll all do.” 

“Hey, this place isn’t a ‘ _tourist trap,'_ we actually _live_ here, man,” Felix says. “This isn’t a beachside resort; this is my home. _That’s_ my home!” He finishes by pointing back to his house, the big box covered in faded yellow siding that’s held up on stilts, front yard disappearing into the driveway made of wet sand. 

“Hey, I didn’t mean it like that,” Minho says. “I’m talking about the places that are there _for_ the tourists, like those souvenir shops with books about the pirates that _s_ _upposedly_ haunt the place, or keychains in the shape of the lighthouse. I know it’s gotta suck for people to treat this place like a zoo.” 

Felix sighs. “I mean, the pirates _do_ haunt us, so suck my dick _,_ but I guess you’re cool. Hyunjin, is this dingbatter cool?” 

Hyunjin cringes, but says, “Yeah, man, he’s cool.” 

Before Minho can open his mouth to ask what the fuck a “ _dingbatter_ ” is, a crack of thunder disrupts the conversation. The sky seems to fall in on itself, giving way to the rain that was building up in the clouds and starting to soak the ground beneath them before they can even react. Felix grabs both Minho’s and Hyunjin’s arms and drags them under his house – he’s well-versed in his storm-safety protocol. It’s damp under the house and only getting wetter as the rainfall seeps into the sandy ground after passing through the grass and mud of the graveyard. 

“ _Fuck,_ man, did we leave our backpacks out there?” Hyunjin asks Felix upon realizing his phone isn’t in his pocket. 

Felix’s eyes widen and he curses, sprinting back into the rain to grab their bags from the yard. Even after only a second in the rain, he’s soaked head-to-toe and Hyunjin’s backpack feels like a wet tire when Felix throws it to him. Digging through the drenched bag, Hyunjin’s relieved to find that most of his more valuable belongings are unharmed, including his phone. Felix isn’t so lucky, though, and he groans a painful noise when he sees the state of his notebook of headstone-names. It’s not destroyed, thankfully, as it had been abandoned under a leaning stone that shielded it from the brunt of the rain, but the pages are undoubtedly wet and the ink soaks through the paper, obscuring names and drawings into big blobs of color. 

“Hyunjin, can I borrow your sweater?” Felix asks. When Hyunjin agrees, unable to resist his pitiful eyes, Felix carefully wraps the notebook with the sweater, keeping it safe from further damage. 

“Is everything gonna be okay?” Minho peeps, wringing his hands together nervously. “Does this happen a lot?” 

Felix nods. “It does, but we gotta keep higher ground,” he says. “Also, you probably aren’t catching that ferry tonight.” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Felix leads the other two boys to a shelter he knows well and Hyunjin gets to know Minho a little more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same notes from last chapter apply here :)
> 
> ALSO: warning for a brief mention of homophobia/homophobic slurs! It's just the q slur but I wanted to put a warning just in case that would upset anybody.

Minho’s phone isn’t working. His data plan isn’t set up for th is place , it’s suited for cities, like the one in which he lives . Not designed for a little island  that’s hours away from t he slightest hint of urban life. 

The texts he writes his family won’t go through.

He turns it off and shoves it into his back pocket, hoping to shield it from the rainfall as he walks alongside the two younger boys.  Felix is leading the way,  with Minho and Hyunjin trudging behind with ruined shoes and soaked-through clothes. Minho’s shivering, not dressed for this weather.  He’s used to an un yielding sun, the kind of heat that lets asphalt melt your shoes if you don’t walk fast enough. On the mainland,  when it  rains this hard,  it’s easy to get in your car and  abandon the city for higher ground; here, your best bet is to  climb onto your roof, or pray to god that the ferries are still operational.

Despite being a local, Hyunjin looks much more nervous than Minho. His face is scrunched up and wrinkled with worry like there’s too much skin on it. Minho feels guilty when he realizes it looks cute.

“Uh…” Hyunjin mumbles as he stares at his feet, carefully sidestepping  puddles and mud to keep on the hard surface of the road. “Where are you from? I don’t think you said.”

“Oh,” Minho says, for some reason surprised by the question, “I’m fro m the city, up near  that old shipyard , if you know where that is.”

Hyunjin does know.

“Huh?” He says, amazed. “The shipyard?  My dad used to work there!” 

His face has brightened, the worry  in his brow unfolding into an easy smile. 

Hyunjin grew up in  that city, his childhood home a square box of government housing built for  shipbuilders that originally  made up the  populace.  His memory of it is foggy, having moved away so young, but  he still  remembers it with a fondness  he doesn’t hold for much else. 

“ That’s where I grew up,” Hyunjin continues, “In the  little shoebox houses by the bay. Which part  do you live in?”

Minho smiles; he’s calmed by the boy’s excitement.

“ I’m from farther into the city, ” he explains. “I graduated from  Maury High.”

Before Hyunjin can answer, tell Minho where his dad graduated from, Felix  yells back at them.

“Hurry  _ up!”  _ He says . He’s probably ten feet ahead of them, expertly skipping over patches of marsh  a s to not soak through his already ratty  Chuck Taylors . 

“Where are we going?” Minho asks, jogging beside Hyunjin to catch up to the youngest.

“Goin’ to  the Baptist Church,” Felix responds. “It’s the  highest place I can think of, besides the lighthouse , which is too close to the water. ”

Hyunjin nods ; the place  is near- abandoned , and him and Felix have spent enough time trespassing on the property to know their way to the roof.  It’s up on high stilts with a huge ramp leading up to the front door , overgrow n grass nearly obscuring the concrete pathway that juts from the gravel road they walk on. 

Soon, they’re approaching the building . To Minho, it seems to appear out of thin air due to the trees that blocked his view the whole way there.  He looks to Hyunjin, and he’s typing away on his phone, not looking up for a second.

“Felix!” He shouts, “our parents are all good, they’re  all together on  the  top of  the motel . I told them where we are , apparently your mom was freaking out.”

Felix  shoots him a thumbs-up before  hopping onto the concrete path that leads up to the ch urch’s ramp. Hyunjin follows but doesn’t notice Minho’s not next to him anymore until he hears his voice again.

“Wait, guys!” He shouts ,  crouching in the soggy grass. “There’s a cat here!”

Felix rolls his eyes. “Dude, there’s stray cats all over this place, they’re fine. Just  _ hurry up,  _ so we can make sure we don’t  _ drown. _ ”

Minho  doesn’t respond. He sneaks up behind the orange little kitten and grabs it, holding onto it as it whines in protest and running up to meet the other two boys.

Hyunjin coos, half at the cat and half at Minho.  Felix huffs and  goes inside. 

-

The storm’s picking up, rain beating harder and harder on the rickety old walls of the church. Felix leads them to  a Sunday school room, the one he went to as a child. There’s still old drawings on the walls,  crude  depictions of biblical scenes —  there’s a crayon drawing of  Noah’s ark  on a piece of pink paper .

The sun is setting outside.

Minho’s still got the  fuckin ’ cat in his hands when Felix looks at him again . He rolls his eyes.

“Hey, Felix,” Hyunjin says, “You think  the curse words we carved into the wall are still there?” Felix laughs , brightening up again. He goes to join Hyunjin, leaving Minho to stand awkwardly with the cat in his arms as he stares  out the window; the sky is pink.

The words are still there: “SHIT” carved into the wall in Hyunjin’s handwriting, “PENIS” in Felix’s. They giggle like they had back then, when they’d each tell each other the new swear words they’d learned over the week. 

Just then, the thin walls of the church start to  groan under the pressure of the wind and rain, and the orange cat jumps out of Minho’s hold. 

Hyunjin’s always been afraid of storms. Felix seems the opposite,  he sees them as a challenge.  As a child, a hurricane wiped out his family’s restaurant (as it had done to many other buildings in town),  but Felix can remember , as a kid,  wondering why he couldn’t save the business a nd the whole island ,  picturing himself  fighting the storm  like a knight slays a dragon.  After that storm, the one that killed  the family  business, he saw  the pitying looks on the faces of his teachers and peers as they delicately tried to  acknowledge his family’s loss in silence. He hated it. The only one who looked at him without the pity he was so used to was the new kid in class —  black hair and dark eyes,  the only kid Felix had met on the island that looked like him.  He told him his name was Hyunjin, which Felix couldn’t pronounce too well, but it was okay .

Neither of them changed much; Hyunjin still isn’t accustomed to the  burning winds and  drowning rain and Felix still thinks he can  shield the other boy from any harm , like he couldn’t do to his family’s restaurant. 

The cat is whining.

Felix sits by Hyunjin as he tries to calm himself down. 

“Hey, dude,” he says, eventually, “I think we should huddle in one of these closets or a bathroom or something , just to stay safe.”

Hyunjin  doesn’t look at Felix but he nods an d he lets his shaky legs bring him off the ground.  Felix guides him to a closet in the back of the room, next to the  crayon-art that decorates the walls. Minho follows after them, but not before picking up the fucking cat.

There’s no light in the closet, so it’s dark for a minute until Felix pulls a flashlight out of his backpack. 

“You  _ always _ laugh at me for carrying a flashlight,” he says, “But I bet you’re jealous now, huh?”

Hyunjin scoffs, lightening up for a moment. The  _ whoosh _ ing of the wind chokes his momentary peace out, though, and he squeezes his eyes shut and lets Felix wrap his arm around him. For a moment, it’s nice, like how they used to huddle together during lesser storms in their shared childhood, the younger boy trying to shield his older friend from the elements and both dodging the other boys at school who’d call them “gay” once they’d reached the age to use the word as an insult. The moment ends soon enough.

“Hey, dude,” Felix starts, fidgeting with his hands still around Hyunjin’s too-broad shoulders. “I’m sorry, but I  _ really  _ gotta piss.”

Hyunjin gives him a dramatic but light-hearted sigh and lets him get up. He takes the flashlight with him, leaving Hyunjin and Minho in the dark – it’s pitch-black once he shuts the closet door.

“Is there even working plumbing in here?” Minho asks in the silence that follows. Hyunjin jumps, having somehow forgotten Minho was even there, next to him in the dark. 

“Uh, I don’t think so,” he says, “But knowing him, he probably won’t have a problem with pissing in a plant or out a window or something.”

Minho chuckles but then silences, leaving an awkward gap in the conversation.

“He...” Hyunjin says, trying to occupy the quiet to still his nervous stomach and distract himself from the creaking of the wood surrounding them. “His family went without running water for a while after the last bad storm, and he tried to bring in his pee-bucket for show-and-tell at school.” Minho starts giggling, and Hyunjin joins him after a second. 

“How long have you guys been friends?” Minho asks suddenly. Hyunjin tells him that he’s known Felix since his first day in the tiny island school. Hyunjin’s family was supposed to move before school started, but the hurricane put a delay on that plan, so he ended up starting the new school in the middle of the semester. The other kids didn’t try to pronounce his name and since school had already started a while before, most of the kids didn’t have any reason or desire to make new friends. He remembers recess that day, watching the other boys play some sandlot version of kickball and the girls all try to “rescue” one of the island’s stray cats that had wandered into the playground. On a bench by the schoolhouse door was another boy he’d seen in class; Hyunjin asked him why he wasn’t playing kickball or helping the girls with the stray cat. The kid told him he had to sit out that day’s recess,  ‘cause a teacher caught him drawing on his desk with a sharpie marker. Hyunjin decided that was pretty cool.

Apparently, the kid’s name was Felix, and his drawings were actually really interesting. When they got back to class, Hyunjin asked to see the contents of the notebook that he’d secretly scribble in during lessons. It was full of ghosts and mythical creatures, dragons and three-headed dogs with wings and horns. Some of them had names, but Felix let Hyunjin name a few.

Minho, in the closet, is laughing again. Hyunjin can feel himself relaxing, even with Felix gone and in the company of a stranger. Minho wants to know more stories, more mythical Felix-lore that Hyunjin’s happy to supply. Through laughs, he tells him about when, in fourth grade, Felix was suspended for punching a kid who’d called him and Hyunjin “queers,” but only after looking up what the word meant on the library’s old computer. He tells him about the time Felix came into school late, eyes puffy and cheeks tearstained. When Hyunjin asked why he’d been crying, Felix told him that his pet hamster had died – Hyunjin comforted him by telling him that he’d get to have a ghost-hamster now, which led to almost three years of Felix taking his ghost pet on walks until he finally was able to process its death. 

Hyunjin and Minho’s shared laughter drowns out the rainfall and the wind, and even the footsteps that approach the closet door.

Hyunjin yelps in fear at the door opening before he sees Felix’s face illuminated by the flashlight’s glow. 

“What were you laughing about?” He asks, plopping himself back down next to Hyunjin after shutting the door. “You guys were fuckin’ loud.”

Minho’s still chuckling when he answers, “Hyunjin was telling me some stories from you guys’ childhood days. You were an interesting kid, I hear.”

Felix rolls his eyes at him. “Yeah?” He starts, “Maybe  _ Hyunjin  _ forgot to mention that he got himself suspended in sixth grade for drawing a dick in my yearbook.”

Hyunjin groans. “Dude, my mom is  _ still  _ mad at me for that,” he grumbles. Minho’s still cackling next to him.

“Hey, man, I’m sure you’ve done some stupid shit,” Felix says to the oldest. “Ooh, I know! How about we play two truths and a lie?”

The childhood memories get passed around for the rest of the night; eventually, in the little closet, Hyunjin falls asleep on Felix, who falls asleep on his backpack, leaving Minho to fall asleep cuddling the orange cat in his arms. They’re safe, in here, for now.

**Author's Note:**

> (Constructive) criticism is absolutely welcome! I am not entirely confident in my writing so if you have any tips, feel free to let me know :)


End file.
